Adoption and use of digital tools in tourist organizations: Case of the Agadir destination

Abstract

Digital tools are now recognized as techniques providing immediate and competitive advantages for companies, and those who integrate and make good use of them, can benefit from a flexibility and a capacity that can allow them to adapt on their market, improve their performance and ensure their competitiveness. The adoption and use of these new technologies by companies allows them to facilitate complex tasks, such as a visibility on the internet, information research, marketing of products and services, customer loyalty, etc.

It is important to understand that the adoption and use of digital technologies like artificial intelligence and digital marketing involves systemic change in many sectors and aspects of human life, while the tourism sector has been among the first to massively integrate these digital techniques and tools, since their advent, and remain, of course, still those who use them the most today because of the nature of their activity and the behavior of their target customers.

This paper will mobilize on the one hand, at the level of the literature review, theoretical and empirical work on the adoption and use of ICT (Rogers, 1983), in this case, digital technologies, digital marketing tool such as social networks, ECRM, etc. On the other hand to understand the determining factors of the adoption and use of digital technology and digital tools.

In a holistic approach, paradigms and research objectives have led us to a mixed approach, the methodology of research provides for a documentary analysis, a statistical analytical support, a field analysis and a series of interviews to complete the available sources, it is based on a qualitative study among institutional actors and a quantitative study administered to hotels 4 and 5 stars.

On the qualitative level, we conducted our study on the CRT of Souss-Massa to answer 10 questions through a semi-directive interview guide, on the quantitative level, it is a representative sample of 11 hotels based in the city of Agadir and Taghazout.

To highlight the impact of the adoption of digital tools on the tourism and hospitality industry, the discussion and analysis of the results at the end of this communication show a behavior favorable to the adoption and use of digital strategy to market the Agadir destination and that this strategy is materialized by the use of different digital tools as well at the regional council of tourism as hoteliers, as for the national level, the difficulty of generalising this study is complex in order to be able to explore the behaviour of tourism and hotel stakeholders with regard to the adoption of information and communication technologies.

JEL Classification: M31

Paper type: Empirical research